Black Toddler Missing, Does The Media Care?

Two-year-old Jada Justice of Portage, Indiana has been missing now for a week. But you wouldn’t know it from watching national television news shows.

The child, a black toddler, was last seen last Tuesday when her cousin said she left the child alone in a car at a Gary, Indiana, convenience store while she went inside.

Justice is now listed on the Web site for the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and on the “America’s Most Wanted” Web site. Television stations, radio stations and newspapers around Gary and Chicago have followed the story and shown photos of Justice with numbers to call to alert authorities if she is spotted.

But unlike the recent cases of Kaylee Anthony of Orange County, Florida and Haleigh Cummings of Satsuma, Florida, the search for Jada has not received the same kind of national attention.

“Unfortunately, in cases like this, it’s not until someone writes about the fact that there is no national attention that they start doing stories,” said Eric Deggans, media and television critic at the St. Petersburg Times.

Gary, Indiana is technically part of the Chicago media market, which is actually larger than the markets where others have lived whose cases of either abduction or exploitation were featured prominently on national television, Deggans said. Major networks often pick up stories from their affiliates in those markets and develop national stories.

“If there were reporters who cared about this, they could be all over it,” Deggans told BlackAmericaWeb.com.